Carey Gallagher with Patrick J. Brennan, Michael Acker, and LuAnn Brady of the University of Pennsylvania Health System present Improving Clinical Outcomes Through Culture Change at the American College of Healthcare Executives’ 2020 Congress on Healthcare Leadership.

In complex health systems, clinical and administrative leaders from the top of the organization to the front lines try to ensure that the system achieves reliable quality outcomes, but they are frequently unable to produce consistent results. Programs facing or at risk of declining quality outcomes can reverse course by leading culture change.

Alignment between culture and aims of any health system, hospital, service line, program or team takes having an active focus of various leaders at many levels and building infrastructure and support for behavior change that leads to improved clinical outcomes. This session identifies how organizational culture works; describes how to identify a problem that needs a cultural intervention; introduces tools for identifying a desired culture shift and making concrete changes to support that aspirational culture; and shows you how use of such tools resulted in culture changes that led to improved clinical outcomes. The presentation is based on a case study of the Cardiovascular Surgery program at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The faculty also will facilitate brief small group conversations to help you identify shared cultural challenges with other attendees and opportunities for your own organization.